Think Tennis Is the Most Gender-Equal Sport? Here's Why That's a Problem

Women's tennis has long been hailed as a victory in gender-equality: its four Grand Slams pay equal prize money to men and women, while it’s one of the few sports that has produced female players that have gone on to become pop culture icons (Venus! Serena! And who can forget early 2000s hotshot, Anna Kournikova?) Yet, inconsistencies reveal upon closer inspection. Should we really be that happy that Wimbledon only started paying equal prize money in 2007, after a prolonged fight by Venus? And what about the barrage of criticism that Venus and Serena receive? Considering that it was only the 2012 London Olympics that first saw women compete in all categories, does it mean that women’s tennis simply is the best sport out of a bad bunch?

Let’s start by talking about money, the easiest, though not necessarily the most meaningful, measure of success: The Forbes’ top 100 list of this year’s top-earning athletes features only one woman, Serena Williams. She comes at 51st place, after five male players including Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Andy Murray, even though she has won the most Grand Slam titles of any person in history and has lucrative endorsements that include Nike, JPMorganChase, and Gatorade. Outside the Grand Slams, the situation is even more bleak: At the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, for example, the biggest event before the US Open, men’s tennis winner Grigor Dimitrov took home almost double of what women’s winner Garbiñe Muguruza received, coming in at $954,225 and $522,450 respectively.

But equality isn’t simply measured by money—in fact, the smaller prize money, accompanied endorsements, and other quantitative measures are most probably a consequence of the many prejudices still embedded towards women’s tennis. Last month, former top player John McEnroe sparked controversy when he told NPR that Serena Williams would come in at 700th place if she were to compete in the men’s circuit, while Andy Murray had to correct a journalist who claimed that Murray was the first American to reach a grand slam semi-final since 2009 (multiple women, including Venus and Serena, have reached the goal in the meantime). “I’ve had people ask me whether I’m concerned about wearing makeup into a match,” Madison Keys, the third-ranked U.S. player in women’s tennis, told Vogue a few days ago. “One year, an on-court commentator asked one of the girls to twirl after the match. Surely, he’s not going to go up to a man to ask, ‘Can you do a spin for us?’”

The perception that women’s tennis isn’t as noteworthy as the men’s side persists even in the most insidious of mediums, the Google search engine. Vogue’s own Patricia Garcia discovered last year that, after Serena Williams took home her 22nd Grand Slam title at Wimbledon and became tied with Steffi Graf as having the most Grand Slam titles in the Open era of tennis, Googling “Tennis Player With the Most Grand Slams” only delivered Roger Federer’s 17 titles.

It seems that to achieve true gender-equality in tennis, or in any sport for that matter, we have to look beyond the prize money players receive in the largest, most visible arena’s. In fact, the danger with tennis is exactly that the equal prize money that comes some of the time could distract from the inequalities that threaten women players most of the time. So what can we do in the meanwhile? I would suggest to start encouraging girls and young women around us to participate, educate ourselves more about the female players in any game, or perhaps simply by tuning into women’s games. Madison Keys, for example, is playing Belgian Elise Mertens Monday the 28th.